Fear Drive My Feet (4 page)

For most of its length the track followed a stream called the Wampit, which was a
tributary of the Markham River. Bob's, I had been told, was almost on the banks of
the Wampit, and not far from the junction of that stream with the Markham. It was
hidden in thick jungle, but one of the carriers said he had been there before and
could guide us to it.

As we walked, the country became lower and flatter, and the track increasingly muddy.
The heat, too, grew more and more oppressive. It was the sort of heat one sometimes
finds in big laundries or in other places where there are large quantities of boiling
water. Though we were now almost down to sea-level, and the heat and humidity could
not have got much worse, I nevertheless had the strange feeling of going ever downward
into an inferno.

At last, a little after five o'clock, with the Wampit on our right hand, the carriers
stopped at a dried-up, rocky little watercourse that crossed the path; they pointed
up it to the left.

‘Master, lookim,' they said. ‘Road belong place belong all master.'

I could see no ‘road'. The boulder-strewn gully showed no footprints. The only track
seemed to lie straight ahead. But they assured me that the path led to the Markham
River, and they struck off confidently up the watercourse. After a few minutes' scrambling
over the stones, I saw Bob's there in front of us.

I shall describe this jungle camp carefully, since for me its atmosphere, its people,
and its life sum up one
important phase of the infinitely varied, infinitely monotonous
activity called war.

The place was named after its founder, Bob Griffiths, who had built it at the time
of the Japanese invasion. He was a member of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, a tiny
local militia of a few hundred, the only force to meet the assault of many thousands
of Japanese. In fact, so few men had we that all the Australian posts at that time
were called only by some familiar name – Bob's, Mac's, Kirkland's, and so on. Nobody
asked who Bob or Mac might be – they were known to all.

From where our little party halted, at the foot of an enormous ficus-tree, I could
see that the camp consisted of a dozen or so rough huts thatched with sago-palm fronds,
and left without walls for the sake of coolness. They were not in a clearing, but
sprawled about in the thickest forest. So intent had their builders been on concealment
from the air that the huts themselves had taken on the impress of the builders' desires,
and had a furtive look about them, almost as if they knew they were supposed to
be hiding.

The tall trees, with their tangled superstructure of creepers, quite blotted out
the sun, and I knew that even at midday the place would have the appearance of being
in a green-tinted twilight. Now, towards dusk, it seemed infinitely sombre and forbidding.
The ground was damp and spongy, and a vague smell of decay pervaded everything.
The jungle tolerated this man-made excrescence, it seemed, confident that in a little
while it would be swallowed up without a trace.

Everything in this little settlement was damp. Clothes and blankets soon acquired
a clammy feeling that was impossible to remove, for one dared not sun them in a patch
of grassland not far away, lest they be spotted by
the Japanese reconnaissance planes
that often flew low overhead. Blowflies buzzed lazily everywhere, and every couple
of days the blankets were fly-blown.

No breeze stirred the air. The smoke from the cooking fires hung motionless in a
blue haze among the trees, and over the whole area hung a fearful silence, too vast
to be broken noticeably by the voices of the forty or fifty men who comprised the
garrison. Even the rattle of gunfire was subdued by this uneasy quiet.

Gaunt, pallid men in ragged green uniforms were moving about the camp doing various
chores – cleaning weapons, sewing up torn clothes – while one directed the work of
a party of natives who were repairing the roof of a hut. Quite close to me, a smart
squad of native police were lined up on parade beneath the trees. A tall serious-faced
man with a close-clipped moustache was quietly calling the roll, sucking hard on
a chipped and blackened pipe between names. This, I knew, must be John Clarke, an
old New Guinea hand who was in charge of the police and the native carriers at Bob's.
When he had finished his roll-call I walked across to him and told him who I was.

He gave me a friendly smile and shook my hand warmly. ‘I heard you were coming. I'm
very pleased to see you. Now, I'll get you fixed up with a place to sleep, and you
can have a clean-up, and we'll have a yarn after that.'

‘Thanks, John. It'll be good to get these clothes off and into some clean ones. I
think I'll have a swim in the Wampit to cool off. Is it safe to go in here?'

‘Pretty safe. But don't go too far out into the current. There don't seem to be many
crocodiles around.'

As we talked, John had been leading the way to a long hut containing only one or
two beds.

‘You'll be pretty private here,' he said. ‘I'll get a couple of boys to put your
bed-sail up at this end, where the roof doesn't leak.'

After his mosquito-net, the bed-sail is probably the New Guinea traveller's most
useful item of furniture. It consists of a double sleeve of canvas about seven feet
long and three feet wide. Two stout poles are inserted along either side to make
a rough stretcher, and the poles are supported at the ends by a couple of stout sticks
lashed together at the top like shear-legs. The result is a tightly stretched canvas
bed, cool and springy, raised two or three feet off the ground. It can be erected
in a few minutes, and the canvas is practically no weight to carry. Moreover, in
the daytime, on the track, it forms a useful waterproof wrapper for blankets.

The boys summoned by John unwrapped the roll of bedding and ran to fetch suitable
poles, while Achenmeri thrust himself importantly forward to supervise this weighty
operation. John raised his eyebrows at the antics of this bumptious and comical constable,
but he said nothing, while I groped in my haversack for some mail I had brought.

He glanced at the handwriting on the envelopes and smiled, before tucking the three
or four letters into the breast pocket of his shirt, to be read and enjoyed later,
alone. It was the first mail he had received for weeks. There was a paper for him,
too, and he slit its wrapper at once.

‘It's the
Bulletin
!' he exclaimed with a grin of pleasure as he unrolled it. ‘I
like to read that – it's my Bible, the
Bulletin
.'

‘Isn't that a pretty old copy?'

‘No, not very,' he said in a surprised voice, looking at the dateline. ‘Only a couple
of months. I've had it a lot older than that.'

I began to understand life at Bob's when I saw how excited John became over a two-month-old
copy of a newspaper. Cut off by rivers and mountainous jungles, these men were isolated
not only in a physical sense, but had their own time-scale as well.

I had found towel and soap in my patrol-box. ‘How do I get to the Wampit, John?'

‘Follow that gully straight on past the main track, where you came in, and keep going.
It's about a hundred yards.'

‘O.K… I'll be back soon.' By the time I had gone ten yards Bob's had vanished so
completely from sight and hearing that I stopped and had to resist deliberately the
desire to run back and reassure myself that the place was really there and that I
had not been dreaming.

By the time I reached the Wampit bank the sun was already below the treetops, and
the palms and wild breadfruit-trees were outlined black against the brassy shine
of the sky. The foliage rustled lightly in the breeze that blew upstream. I sat down
on a log at the water's edge and slowly unlaced my boots, then pulled off my green
shirt and shorts and let them fall in a sweat-soaked heap on the little beach of
black sand.

The river here, in its lower reaches, was swift and muddy, but the water was cool.
I waded gratefully in to thigh-depth and washed myself. New life seemed to return
with cleanliness. At this somewhat open point the breeze was too strong for the mosquitoes
to be a pest, so, having dried myself, I squatted naked on the log and looked downstream.

Not far away the Wampit almost lost itself in a vast flat area of swamp and sago-palms
before emptying into the mighty Markham. Over the trees and across the Markham (which
of course I could not see), I glimpsed again the Saruwageds. Filtered through an
almost invisible haze of dust, the evening light cast a delicate softness upon them.
They were blue, every conceivable shade from ice-blue to deepest purple. I knew that
even the foothills were at least twenty miles away, but the mountains showed with
startling clarity, mounting up and up, fold upon fold, until the tops disappeared
into a level bank of cloud. I studied them intently, knowing that the next few weeks
would find me somewhere in their remote blue fastnesses.

‘Somewhere over there is Jock,' I thought. ‘And somehow I have to find him.'

It was nearly dark. I pulled the towel about my waist and hobbled barefoot up the
stony creek-bed, back to the camp. When I got there the others were putting on long
trousers and gaiters, rolling down their sleeves, and rubbing their hands and faces
with mosquito-repellent lotion; in short, making all the preparations for evening
which characterize the mosquito-infested camp.

John Clarke appeared out of the gloom as I was getting dressed. He looked slightly
embarrassed, I thought.

‘You aren't an – er – officer, are you?' he asked.

My shirt carried no badges of rank, and his bore none either, though I knew he was
a lieutenant. In fact, hardly anyone wore his rank in those days, partly because
the store never had any badges and also because the Japanese made a feature of trying
to pick officers and N.C.O.s off first, if they could identify them.

‘No – I'm only a warrant-officer. Why?'

‘Well, you see, we have an officers' mess here. I'd like you to eat with me, but
of course – '

I cut him short. ‘For God's sake don't worry about that! Just show me where the other
mess is, and I'll be O.K.'

‘It's not quite so simple. There's a headquarters mess, where the sigs and orderly-room
staff and so on eat, and a sergeants' mess, and of course there's the men's mess.
I suppose you'd better eat at the sergeants' mess.'

I stared at him. Here were forty or fifty men at the edge of the world, and pretty
well on the edge of eternity too; bound together, one would have thought, by every
important tie both of interest and sentiment. And yet, to take their meals, they
split up into four groups. I could see that John's sense of personal hospitality
was somewhat offended at having to send me to eat elsewhere, but that the system
itself was crazy didn't seem to occur to him. And, to be quite honest, within a day
or two I had so slipped into the way of things myself that I found nothing ludicrous
in the spectacle of the same atrocious food from one central cookhouse being carried
through the bush among the flies to four different mess-huts. Very few of the absurdities
and injustices of army life worry you much at the time. You can't buck the system,
so you put up with it, and pretty soon you don't notice. I don't think this means
that most people are militaristic at heart. Real militarists are those who seek to
justify the system, and find it good. The vast majority tolerate it because they
have no choice.

As I finished buttoning up my sleeves John pointed out the sergeants' mess on the
far side of the camp. The loud clatter of a beaten kerosene-tin announced that tea
was ready.

‘You'll be right, then, will you? I'll see you later,' John said, and made off into
the darkness.

I strolled across to the sergeants' mess – a rough hut like all the others. A man
was setting fire to little piles of green leaves all round it, making a smoke-screen
to keep the mosquitoes away. A smoky hurricane-lamp spread a shadowy red glow over
the interior. Four stout poles driven into the dirt floor supported the rough table-top
provided by light sticks laid side by side. The five men round the table were perched
in various attitudes of discomfort on old bully-beef cases. They were meditating
quietly, saying nothing at all to each other.

As I introduced myself and asked whether I could share their meal, they hastily found
another case for me, assuring me I was welcome. They wanted to hear the
latest news
from Wau, and would have welcomed the devil himself to supper, I believe, provided
he had brought some diverting gossip with him.

I looked round the table at my companions as they told me their names. They were all
young men – not one of them out of his twenties – but without exception they were
heavily bearded. For all one could see of their faces they might have been middle-aged.

Among them was Bill Chaffey, a farmer and Member of Parliament from New South Wales,
with an enormous red bushy beard that made him look like the prophet Isaiah. And
there was Bob Sherman, an Englishman, whose glossy black whiskers reminded me of
a melodrama villain. If he had suddenly exclaimed, ‘Ha, my proud beauty! Out into
the snow!' it would have seemed quite in keeping with his appearance.

The meal consisted of bully beef, sweet potatoes, and papaw, and no great plenty
at that. When it was finished, tobacco was produced, pipes filled and cigarettes
rolled. For weeks not one of them had smoked a shred of proper tobacco, and ancient
pieces of newspaper had taken the place of cigarette-papers. Some smoked the trade
twist that was issued to the natives – foul black stuff made, I should say, from
the sweepings from cigar factories and bound together with molasses in plaited sticks.
Others rolled their own cigars from brus, the native-grown leaf tobacco, purchased
from the kanakas in nearby villages. This too, was terribly strong. After a couple
of brus cigars a Capstan seemed tasteless.